Reading Strategies

"Our Work" Board of ongoing classroom activities: Keep a large area of your room free, near your gathering area, for tacking up your current work-in-progress (your poems for the week, shared writing, word strategies...). This will allow everyone a place of reference to come back to... "Remember? It's up there on the "Our Work Board."

"Read Around the Room":  Using the poems from the resource section of this web, copy and blow up the print on your photocopier at school to fit an 11" x 17" paper. Laminate for future years, and then you can use dry-erase markers or overhead transparency markers to highlight the key areas of focus on the poems. Keep the poems up as long as you can and keep them handy to pull out for a child to reference.  Children can use pointers to go back to these poems for independent reading or shared reading times.

Laminated words: Letting children handle and play with words to create or recreate text

Literacy materials in centers

Photos, calendar pictures, visuals with labels

Alphabet Charts

Photos of children in classrooms with names

Class book with children's names

Name Board

Pocket charts to separate whole chunks of language into words

Computer software for stimulating language development

Poetry folders of child created poetry as well as for collections of poems that a child may favor

Games and materials that encourage capital and lower case letter learning

Add new verses to existing poems

Create new patterns from familiar stories

Activities that help children understand the world, in and out of the classroom

Songs, chants, and poems that are fun to sing and say

Concept development and vocabulary-building lessons

Activities that help children to understand that print represents spoken language

Activities that highlight the meanings, uses, and production of print found in classroom signs, label, notes, posters, calendars, and directions.

Activities that teach print conventions, such as directionality.

Opportunities for children to practice handling books - how to turn pages, how to find the tops and bottoms of pages, and how to tell the front and back covers.

Lessons in word awareness that help children become conscious of individual words, their boundaries, their appearance and their length.

Activities in which children practice with predictable and patterned language stories.

Daily time for self-selected reading.

Access to books that children want to read in their classrooms and schools.

Access to books that can be taken home to be read independently or to family members.

Wide reading of a variety of genres, both narrative and informational  

Instruction that provides explicit information both about the meanings of words and about how they are used in the stories the children are reading.

Activities that involve children in analyzing context to figure out the meaning of unfamiliar words in a reading passage.

Discussion of new words that occur during the course of the day, e.g. books that have been read aloud by the teacher, in content area studies and in textbooks. 

Practice in decoding and identifying words that contain the letter-sound relationships children are learning to read and need for reading and writing.

Practice activities that involve word families and rhyming patterns.

Practice activities that involve blending together the components of sounded-out words.

"Word play" activities in which children change beginning, middle, or ending letters of related words, thus changing the words they decode and spell.

Introduction of phonetically "irregular" words in practice activities and stories.

Language games that teach children to identify rhyming words and to create rhymes on  their own.

Language games that teach children to identify rhyming words and to create rhymes on  their own.

Activities that help children understand that spoken sentences are made up of groups of separate words, that words are made up of syllables, and that words can be broken down  into separate sounds.

Alphabetic awareness activities in which children learn that printed words are made up of patterns of letters.

Lessons in sound-letter relationships that are organized systematically and that provide as much practice and review as is needed.

As children exhibit behaviors indicative of emergent literacy, parents and teachers can seize the teachable moments, and provide developmentally appropriate materials and interactions to further literacy development.

Alphabetic knowledge activities in which children learn the names of letters and learn to  identify them rapidly and accurately.

Activities that are related to the words that children are reading and writing.

Proofreading activities

Activities that surround children in words and make reading and writing purpose-filled.

Activities that help children learn to preview selections, anticipate content, and make connections between what they will read and what they already know.

Instruction that provides options when understanding breaks down (e.g. rereading, asking for expert help, and looking up words).

Guidance in helping children compare characters, events, and themes of different stories.

Activities that encourage discussion about what is being read and how ideas can be linked (e.g. to draw conclusions and make predictions).

Activities that help children extend their reading experiences through the reading of more difficult texts with the teacher.

Early support of letter knowledge and phonemic awareness.

Instruction on letter-sound correspondences and spelling conventions.

Opportunity and encouragement to use spelling-sound knowledge in reading and writing.

Daily sessions for independent and supported reading with attention to both fluency and comprehension.

Active exploration of new language, concepts, and modes of thought that are offered by written text.

Practice in decoding and identifying words that contain the letter-sound relationships children are learning to read and need for reading and writing.